


Scattered bones

by cuneifire



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 20th Century, Gen, Historical Hetalia, Holocaust, Occupation of Poland, World War II, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 12:42:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14237550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuneifire/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: Poland digs graves.





	Scattered bones

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys. Uh- *laughs nervously* so I should probably say I love writing about history. Even the bad parts of it.  
> DISCLAIMER: Disclaimer: Deals with historical topics that may be controversial to some. This was not written with the intent to offend. Opinions of the characters are not necessarily that of the author.  
> Also, thank you to Melancholy_philosopher for translating this into [Pусский ](https://ficbook.net/readfic/6845295)!

1942

.

The shovel hits frozen dirt with a loud clank. Poland keeps digging regardless, shoving all his weigh onto the back of the thing, finally making it kick up a miniscule amount of dirt.

He frowns, biting his lip. Winter cold wears through his thin gloves; he notices a piece of leather ready to fall off one of his boots. How long has he had those now?

Doesn’t matter, he thinks as he shoves the shovel down again, making more leeway this time. The grave’s about half done by now, three hours of work in constant _pierdolony_ cold.

Three other graves sit next to it, from earlier work. He can’t count how long he’s been here; the hours seem to slip by. He started when the sun was just setting, he thinks.

He stares at the corpses, sighing at the gassed and limp bodies of his citizens. The work seems fruitless, with how many of them seem to die without so much as a final goodbye from their loved ones, without a sole possession to their names.

But it’s more than Germany gives them, so he figures maybe a grave is better than nothing.

He digs.

He doesn’t know any of these people’s names; he never knew them when they were alive. If he did, he’d put a marker on their graves, so maybe, someday, someone would find them and remember them. But he can’t, even if he knew the names buying so much would give him away, let that _skurwysyn_ Germany know he does something other than mope around and slowly starve to death.

He can count his ribs, or rather could, if he ever had a mirror. Which sucks, because he really wants to make sure his hair still looks awesome.

If it doesn’t, Germany has all of _piekło_ coming for him.

He figures the grave’s about three quarters done. Poland wishes he had a cigarette. Or a cigar. Or just food would be nice.

But he doesn’t have any of those, so he keeps digging.

He wonders how everyone else is doing. He heard France got occupied too, after listening to the radio, wading through hours of hearing about the greatness of the Third Reich to find actual information. And there was something about an invasion of England, which he’d known mostly because so many of his people tried to escape there.

He hoped Lithuania was doing better than he was.

His arms ache when he finishes digging the grave, and he looks over to the corpses of his people.

He should probably put them in now.

He picks up the first one with a bit of struggle, despite how light the body is. He doesn’t bother trying to put names or faces to the graves, they all look very similar. Hollowed out cheeks, paled and peeling skin, sores and bruises, empty and dead eyes that sometimes flicker open at the oddest of times. Naked and robbed of anything that might be valuable, because the gold teeth they wore were worth more than their lives.

The process repeats itself; he picks the body up, drops it into the dug-out grave, and then spends the next hours refilling it, stamping down the earth to make it seems as if nothing was underneath the earth. He’d gotten good at the process over the last year.

He’s on the third grave when something about the person he’s holding makes him pause.

A man- long nosed, darker skin than most of his citizens.

He’s a Jew, Poland thinks as he drops the man into the grave, perhaps quicker than he should’ve. He hears a crack of bones against frozen dirt as he turns around to fill the grave with dirt again.

He doesn’t know how to feel about that. Some- he doesn’t know how many- of his people despise them, say they own too much and deserve whatever fate Germany plans for them. Some of them say that.

But he still hurts when they die, still feels the life bleeding out of him when so many of them are sent to camps, tortured and shot and then, shortly afterwards, die.

So he buries the man as he buries any of his other citizens.

He finishes the final grave of the day, eyelids fluttering shut just as he shakes himself. He needs to get back to Warsaw. The sun’s just rising, and there are always things to do - authorities to pretend to care about, streets to scrounge for extra fabric to make dresses, rebellions and uprisings to plot.

But he’s tired, from doing this for so many weeks and not being able to sleep. There’s so _many_ of them, so many dead citizens he can’t count, couldn’t dig enough graves even if he had another seventy years.

He pulls himself up, straightening his back and throwing the shovel over his back as he sets out to return to the city.

He’ll do this again tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that. Because they are his people, and it is his duty.

He’ll keep digging.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes  
> -Translations: Pierdolony- Fucking. Skurwysyn- Bastard. Piekło- Hell.  
> -German occupation of Poland lasted from 1939-1945, originally partitioned between the Soviets and the Nazis before the German attack of Soviet positions during 1941. Despite military defeat, the Polish government never officially surrendered, instead moving in exile to London for the rest of the war, and later the Soviet control of the country.  
> -The Nazis though the Poles and inferior race, discriminating against them with the hopes of eventually forcing them out of their homeland and using it for Lebensraum, supposed German ‘Living space’. During the German occupation, about three million (non-Jewish) Poles and three million Jewish Poles were killed by the occupiers, approximately twenty two percent of the previous population of the country, the highest rate in Europe.  
> -Poles and Jews were sent to ‘work’ camps, which were in all reality more so death camps. In camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, people were either worked to death or, if deemed incapable of working (children, seniors, the disabled) sent immediately to the ‘showers’ where they were removed of all valuable possessions (including gold teeth, clothing, and their hair, which was remade into blankets) and then gassed. The people were buried in mass graves.  
> -Although not much talked about, Anti-Semitic attitudes did exist in Poland, pre and post war. Some Poles thought lowly of the Jews, and some were even collaborators with the Nazis, notably in the town of Jedwabne, where local citizens, at the prompting of Nazi occupiers, rounded up and killed three hundred of the town’s Jews.  
> -It should also be mentioned that Polish Jews were receivers of some of the most rescues in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, with many Poles aiding Jews in receiving documents that would allow them to escape the Ghetto. The rescue figure of Polish Jews is put at anywhere from 100, 000-150, 000.  
> -Poland also had one of the most well organized and effective Resistances throughout the war, with a Home Army (loyal to the exiled government) established in February 1942 with numbers of 100, 000, later augmenting to 200, 000 members in early 1943, and reaching its peak in the summer of 1944. Estimation of members say approximately 400, 000. 
> 
> Talk to me in the comments about what you liked or didn't, or maybe just to yell at me about history!  
> (Again, not trying to piss anyone off. Though I probably will.)


End file.
